At the time, The Gift didn’t quite realise its potential. Anthropology has always reflected upon other ways of thought, but it has been less inclined to think with them. Mary Douglas made a point that perhaps The Gift just wasn’t published at the right time. But now, exactly a century later, could it be that the answer to seeing the fallacy of our current form of economics lies not in academic journals and hallways, but in the moments in history where it was challenged. Just like Medusa’s lair, when a mirror is placed against the horrors of the world, there’s a good chance they’ll turn to stone and crumble to pieces- and with it, our ambivalence, anxiety, and fear.  

Mauss believed the hau, or the spirit of the thing given, was a method of achieving human solidarity. Rather than being a structure which wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it, with hau, there is the potential for a world that surprises everyone. What Mauss ultimately argued was that economic contracts in societies such as Te Ao Māori were agreements to not act in accord with one's own economic self interest. Mauss reminds us that just as socialization does not end at age twelve or eighteen, the creation of objects does not end on the factory floor — things are continually being maintained, altered, and above all, vested in new meanings, even as they are often repeatedly detached and alienated again.

But this only scratches the surface of hau. Its English translation is breath or wind, but Ranapiri reminds us that ‘the hau is not the wind that blows–no,  not at all’. Consider this karakia recorded by Te Kohuora of Rongoroa in 1854:

Na te kune te pupuke 

Na te hihiri te mahara 

Na te mahara te hinengaro 

Na te hinengaro te manako 

Ka hua te waananga 

Ka noho i a rikoriko 

Ka puta ki waho ko te poo 

Ko te poo i tuturi, te poo i pepeke 

Te poo uriuri, to poo tangotango 

Te poo wawaa, te poo tee kitea 

Te poo i oti atu ki te mate 

Naa te kore i ai 

Te kore tee whiwhia 

Te kore tee rawea 

Ko hau tupu, ko hau ora 

Ka noho i te atea 

Ka puta ki waho ko te rangi e tuu nei 

Te rangi e teretere nei 

I runga o te whenua 

Ka noho te rangi nui e tuu nei 

Ka noho i a ata tuhi

Ka puta ki waho ko te marama 

Ka noho te rangi e tuu nei

 Ka noho i a te werowero 

Ka puta ki waho ko te raa 

Kokiritia ana ki runga 

Hei pukanohi moo te rangi 

Te ata rapa, te ata ka mahina 

Ka mahina te ata i hikurangi!

From the source of growth the rising

From rising the thought 

From memory the mind-heart 

From the mind-heart, desire 

Knowledge became conscious 

It dwelt in dim light And darkness emerged 

The dark for kneeling, the dark for leaping 

The intense dark, to be felt 

The dark to be touched, unseen 

The dark that ends in death 

From nothingness came the first cause 

Possessed nothingness

Unbound nothingness 

The hau of growth, the hau of life 

Stayed in clear space

And the atmosphere emerged

The sky which floats

Above the earth 

The great sky above us 

Stayed in red light 

And the moon emerged 

The sky above us 

Stayed in shooting light 

And the sun emerged 

Flashing up To light the sky 

The early dawn, the early day, the mid-day

The blaze of day from the sky!

..and then the land emerged, then the gods, then people

In other words, Māori institutions express one fact alone, one social system, one precise state of mind: everything—food, people, property, talismans, land, labour, priestly functions, and ranks—is there for passing on, and for balancing accounts. Everything passes to and fro as if there were a constant exchange of a spiritual matter, including things and men, between clans and individuals, distributed between social ranks, the sexes, and the generations.

Wānanga atu wānanga mai, whakawhitiwhiti whakāro, 

Your wisdom for mine, as we cross our thoughts together

Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt 

They who cross the seas change their skies, not their souls

Tuki and Ngahuruhuru were kidnapped by the crew of the vessel Daedelus. They wept and lamented for days in a state of noho puku (silent and inactive), refusing to communicate with their captors. They remained this way until they reached the crossroads of Melanesia and Polynesia– the penal colony beyond the pines– Norfolk Island. The companions were brought to Governor Phillip Gidley King– who had desired natives to teach convicts how to weave harakeke (Phormium tenax) into clothes, ropes, and sails. However, they explained that weaving is the business of women, not men. It seems the Norfolk colonists knew nothing of their ship's name, for Daedalus was the father of Icarus– the famous Greek hero who flew too close to the sun and paid dearly for it. But the Greeks remember his father Daedelus as an innovator who constructed King Midas’ maze and his sons' makeshift wings. Daedalus is a mythical symbol for innovation, specifically for the very thing which enabled colonial expansion: sails. But here is one of the great ironies that appears in the colonial project– the colonists had no idea how to make sails at all, in fact, they needed natives to show convicts how to do it. Underneath the hubris of civilization is the fact that behind every lie is the truth. Daedelus wouldn’t live up to his name, yet Governor King, who was a racketeer as much as he was an opportunist, brought the strangers into his home. 

The rangatira were deeply insulted by their removal, but King broke the spell of noho puku. He wrote that by taking ‘every pain…to attach them to us’, by having them eat with him at his table, and by leaving them to their own inclinations, he induced them to become more sociable. King knew the pen was mightier than the sword, evident in his role in printing one of Australia’s first newspapers: The Sydney Gazette. Like a wolf in sheep's clothing, Governor King carefully laboured to establish trust, but in reality, it was the beginning of a Faustian bargain. First they exchanged food, then language, where King recorded one of the first English to Māori vocabularies. But then they exchanged something else. He gave Tuki some chalk, where he drew a map of the world, as he knew it, on the floor of the government house. Tuki revealed knowledge of Te Ao Māori– Te Ika a Māui (The north island), Te Waipounamu (the south island), the Cavalli islands (Motukawanui), and in the middle, the spirit path which ends at Te Reinga where he marked a pōhutakawa tree– the leaping point of the spirits. After some months, provisions were made to return the rangatira home. King wouldn’t accompany them, but bestowed them with more taonga: handaxes, carpenters tools, scissors, razors, hoes, spades, seeds, wheat, maize, peas, ten sows, and two boars. Tuki promised to keep them. Upon their arrival home, a circle enclosed Tuki and he recounted what they had seen. He presented a cabbage which affirmed the distance of their journey, as it was cut five days before from Kings garden. 

With this, you can see how the past is like fragments. Both the British Empire and rangatira took fragments from other civilisations and societies– and their legendary heroes of myth, such as Daedelus and Maui, and likened themselves to doing a similar sort of thing. This is even typical of artists who steal from other artists of the past, in some ways obvious, in others not. By taking fragments from the past we attempt to translate them, to make them readable again. Walter Benjamin said the task of the translator is to ensure that the fragments follow each other but do not resemble each other. Instead of striving for similarity towards the original fragment, the translation– in its own language– must form itself according to the original. In other words, the translator must take the original and the translation, and make them both recognisable as broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are parts of a vessel. The goal isn’t to recapture the spirit of the original, but to show what is missing from it. The translator has to produce another fragment, which does not imitate, but shows how the original itself is a fragment, in turn breaking the original even more. This is the mechanism behind Te Koha– to hold a mirror against colonialism and illuminate its cracks and fractures. It devalues colonialism by changing its narrative to make it appear in a totally different way. In doing so, the variations become equal and the shattering is celebrated. 

It didn’t take long for word of  Tuki and Ngahuruhuru’s journey to reach the ears of neighbouring chiefs. Māori by now had begun travelling as far as Asia, America, and Europe– majority of these seamen were from Ngāpuhi and Muriwhenua. One in particular was Te Pahi, who first appears in the writings of a surgeon named John Savage (he writes Tippahee); who traveled aboard the Ferret visiting the Bay of Islands in 1805, just missing Te Pahi as he had already left for New South Wales.

The capital of this part of the country, which is situated partly on the main land, and partly on a small island, is called Tippoonah [‘Te Puna’ sic; he is referring to one of the islands in Wairoa Bay], and consists in the whole of about a hundred dwellings. On the main the dwellings of the natives are surrounded each by a little patch of cultivated ground; but the island is appropriated to the residence of a chieftain and his court, where no cultivation is carried on. This island is so exceedingly abrupt in its ascent, and consequently so easily defended against an enemy, that it is frequently the refuge of the natives in time of war; answering all the purposes of a citadel of considerable strength: It is also their arsenal and general depot for articles of value in times of—peace—I was about to add; but, alas! These times are rarely known in savage life where the population is considerable. Tippeehee [Te Pahi], the chieftain, has a well-constructed dwelling on this island, and a large collection of spears, war mats, and other valuables

Savage is referring to the economic hub of Ngāpuhi, where the chief of Te Hikutu, Te Pahi, oversaw incoming and outgoing ships of traders, sealers, and whalers from as far as America, Australia, and Europe. On the one hand, relations seem somewhat positive, as Te Pahi made deliberate efforts to service Pākeha with wood and water at a cheap rate of barter. But on the other hand, Pākeha eventually felled rākau for spars without permission, and they took potatoes and other goods provided by Māori without payment. Despite Te Pahi’s desire for relationships free of convict, the ‘theft’ of community property, and beatings of local people, was regarded with abhorrence by the rest of Ngāpuhi. 

I am inclined to believe, in many instances where disagreement takes place between Europeans and savages, the former are the aggressors. The lowest profligate of Europe fancies himself a superior being, and treats the untaught native of a peaceful isle, as an animal almost unworthy of his consideration; he communicates the diseases of civil life, and commits acts of treachery and outrage without the least remorse. Acts of this description are handed down to posterity, by tradition, among the natives, and they revenge the injuries done to their ancestors upon all Europeans that come within their power. Thus, in many instances, the cruelty and perfidy experienced by Europeans, in various parts of the uncivilized world, should not be wholly attributed to natural propensities, but in part to the gratification of revenge for former injuries.

Te Pahi’s goodwill had been deeply strained. Such as in March 1808, when Captain Alexander Bodie of the Elizabeth tied Te Pahi to the ship’s rigging for hours in a dispute over a trade of potatoes. Not only was Te Pahi blameless, but this was also ‘a terrible assault upon the mana of a chief, and Te Pahi and his people must have been extremely angry’(footnote). If the Pākeha had done these things in England, they would have been severely punished. But the cumulative effect of these incidents leads back to utu– effecting a law and restoring a balance. From Tuki and Ngahuruhuru’s journey, Te Pahi found an answer. He sent his son, Matara, to New South Wales in a whaling vessel. Matara returned with more goods than Tuki and Ngahuruhuru– mainly tools and pigs, sent in recognition of his hospitality and power. In September 1805, Te Pahi decided to visit Norfolk Island with four of his sons. On the journey he became victim to violence and prejudice from yet another Captain. He kidnapped one of Te Pahi’s sons, who was just eight years old, as payment for their passage. The commandant of Norfolk, John Piper, quickly realised the present and future consequences of offending the most important Māori chief engaged in trans-Tasman trade, and ameliorated the situation by rescuing the son and offering hospitality—a practice of great currency (quote). On learning that King had been made Governor of New South Wales, Te Pahi and his sons made their way to Port Jackson on the Buffalo. Bad weather brought a scheduled stop in Port Dalrymple (known today as Launceston), where he met David Collins, founder of the British settlement and Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). They eventually reached New South Wales (Port Jackson), where Te Pahi and his sons spent three months with Governor King.

Matara was the first to depart again– this time sent by his father to England where he would meet George III [get timeline right]. Te Pahi told the governor he had long planned to visit the British colony. His explicit objective was to increase his mana– a strategy that would give him access to goods and connections (hau) that would improve his community standing (mana). He observed customs, technology, law, trade, and agriculture. He lamented on the poverty– such as the treatment of a convict who was sentenced to the gallows for stealing a piece of pork. He pleaded to King for the convicts release, that killing a man over stealing pork was a most sanguine act. He keenly remarked on the flour mill– as Port Jackson revealed an image of communally owned resources which would benefit the community– and ultimately, a distribution of wealth; an important component for understanding the distribution of wellbeing (q). Te Pahi’s socialistic attitude was influenced by the growing mistreatment of Māori back home and abroad; such as the far too common abuse suffered from ship Captains. This actually happened so much that a Government General Order was issued that prevented masters of ships from taking Māori anywhere except back to their islands of origin. Te Pahi was addressing a redress against utu and was initiating a strategy to prevent further damage to it. It could only tilt so much further before utu would be laid out on European ships working in the South pacific– which would have consequences for trade and enterprise. Given the Treaty of Waitangi– which extended the rights of British citizens to Māori in New Zealand– would not be drafted and signed for another 35 years, the Order was unprecedented in protecting the ‘properties, claims for wages and [providing] the same redress as any of Her Majesty’s subjects’ for this community of Pacific people in Australia. But the colony he imagined was not the colony he saw, as unfortunately the Order had no influence outside of Port Jackson.

While this was happening another significant journey took place. John Savage the surgeon departed Te Pahi’s kainga and brought the young Moehanga (Moyhanger he writes this time) with him. Savage describes Moehanga as kind hearted and affectionate. They spent two weeks in London together, and preparations were made for Moehanga to be presented to George III. On Moehanga’s departure, he writes that he ‘held my hand at taking leave a considerable time, during the whole of which he wept, and appeared to suffer exceedingly: I remind him of his riches, and the man of consequence he would become upon his country– of his power to entertain all his friends of recital of the wonders seen and knowledge he had acquired; the idea pleased him; but he left shedding tears’. When Moehanga returned to the Bay of Islands, the tools he brought with him were dispersed, and he was left only with his stories. So unbelievable it was to his community that he was deemed pōrangi (insane).

In 1806, Te Pahi returned home with a foreboding gift from governor King– a prefabricated house– the first European house to be built in New Zealand– at the top of his island pā at Wairoa Bay. Te Pahi’s diplomacy was a political effort that has an exact resemblance to the clauses that would be outlined in the Treaty of Waitangi. With the importance of Crown obligations, with utu, there was a relational logic to Te Pahi’s decisions, yet the sense of superiority in one's own reciprocity– a calculated move in the form of the house, that placed the hau in Te Pahi’s court. 

The companions paddled out to receive this canoe without an outrigger, and to their surprise, the white goblins eagerly hoisted them up on board. As custom, the companions requested to see what taonga, treasures, they had in their possession. As they went below to the cabin, they noticed the ship had begun to set sail. Tuki and Ngahuruhuru tried to flee through the windows, only to be restrained and tied to the mast where they watched Motukawanui become a speck on the horizon. I imagine my tūpuna saw that canoe without an outrigger that crept in with the tides. They saw a shift, a fracture in time, where history would no longer repeat itself, it would begin to rhyme.

Tuki and Ngahuruhuru were rangatira– a class of free warrior nobles politically motivated by personal debts, loyalties, and vengeances. The life of a rangatira was incredibly theatrical. One's tongue needed to be just as sharp as one's taiaha. The art of boasting and lying were highly refined practices. But above all, the measure of mana, spiritual authority, was in their social and economic networks, where rangatira would create and satisfy obligations with their kinsmen. In the absence of writing, there were elaborate techniques of oral composition– where daring young warriors likened themselves to the feats of ancestors and demi-gods who fished up islands, carved out rivers, and vanquished demons of the sea. Such obligations were based on honour, which were symbolically displayed through the exchange of taonga– which are vehicles for mana as they carry the spirit of ones entire lineage. This spirit, or vital essence, within taonga is the ‘hau’-- which led Tuki and Ngahuruhuru to paddling out like fish to the lure. Voices in the wind had cried out, but the companions, to their travail, would realise that the white goblins had other intentions besides gifts.

If we jump forward in time, to just over a century after Tuki and Ngahuruhuru’s kidnapping; and a century before today, in 1925, a French anthropologist named Marcel Mauss published ‘The Gift’ – a series of intellectual works about ‘gift economies’. Mauss brought the wisdom of a tohunga named Tamati Ranapiri in his famous passage of te hau o te ngahere, the spirit of the forest, recorded in Elsdon Best's ethnographies, into the anthropology discipline. Although The Gift led to thousands of further projects which expanded upon gift economies, what is often missed is that Mauss’ reasons for publishing The Gift were in fact political– primarily in response to Vladimir Lenin’s new economic policy. Mauss couldn’t understand why the Soviets couldn’t just abolish the market– Lenin first tried to institutionalise a non-market society, which didn’t quite work, and he tried again with his new economic policy.  Mauss was ambivalent about the Soviet revolution, after all, he was a socialist who was seeing his ideas being put into practice, yet he couldn't stand the people that were doing it. He turned to credit those who influenced his ideas– for two decades earlier, the Tohunga Suppression Act had been instantiated, where tohunga such as Ranapiri would begin to vanish, and their wisdom along with them.

The powers of the knowing self: thought, memory, mindheart, knowledge, and desire– emerged before the rest of reality was formed. From the mind heart came darkness– where Te Kore, the potential for everything to come, dwelt. And from here emerged the hau, the breath of life, producing all forms in Te Ao Marama, The World of Light. In Te Reo, when we say I or myself, we say ‘ahau’ as we are the living face of our tūpuna. When we speak of our tūpuna, it’s because we share hau together. When Tuki and Ngahuruhuru requested to see the taonga on the ship, it wasn’t for material gain, they were initiating whakahau– the active modifier of hau – which means to command, initiate, increase in value. As taonga are vehicles for mana, they carry not just the spirit of the donor, but the entire hapū. Taonga are productive, they bring life to a transaction, so evident in the joy, sincerity, and endearment one experiences upon receiving a gift. It reveals that to present a gift is to present something of oneself, such as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes: 

‘it is not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other. The contracting parties are legal entities: clans, tribes, and families who confront and oppose one another either in groups who meet face to face in one spot, or through their chiefs, or in both these ways at once. Moreover, what they exchange is not solely property and wealth, movable and immovable goods, and things economically useful. In particular, such exchanges are acts of politeness: banquets, rituals, military services, women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs, in which economic transaction is only one element, and in which the passing on of wealth is only one feature of a much more general and enduring contract. Finally, these total services and counter-services are committed to in a somewhat voluntary form by presents and gifts, although in the final analysis they are strictly compulsory, on pain of private or public warfare. We propose to call all this the system of total services’

Tuki and Ngahuruhuru were kidnapped by the crew of the vessel Daedelus. They wept and lamented for days in a state of noho puku (silent and inactive), refusing to communicate with their captors. They remained this way until they reached the crossroads of Melanesia and Polynesia– the penal colony beyond the pines– Norfolk Island. The companions were brought to Governor Phillip Gidley King– who had desired natives to teach convicts how to weave harakeke (Phormium tenax) into clothes, ropes, and sails. However, they explained that weaving is the business of women, not men. It seems the Norfolk colonists knew nothing of their ship's name, for Daedalus was the father of Icarus– the famous Greek hero who flew too close to the sun and paid dearly for it. But the Greeks remember his father Daedelus as an innovator who constructed King Midas’ maze and his sons' makeshift wings. Daedalus is a mythical symbol for innovation, specifically for the very thing which enabled colonial expansion: sails. But here is one of the great ironies that appears in the colonial project– the colonists had no idea how to make sails at all, in fact, they needed natives to show convicts how to do it. Underneath the hubris of civilization is the fact that behind every lie is the truth. Daedelus wouldn’t live up to his name, yet Governor King, who was a racketeer as much as he was an opportunist, brought the strangers into his home. 

The rangatira were deeply insulted by their removal, but King broke the spell of noho puku. He wrote that by taking ‘every pain…to attach them to us’, by having them eat with him at his table, and by leaving them to their own inclinations, he induced them to become more sociable. King knew the pen was mightier than the sword, evident in his role in printing one of Australia’s first newspapers: The Sydney Gazette. Like a wolf in sheep's clothing, Governor King carefully laboured to establish trust, but in reality, it was the beginning of a Faustian bargain. First they exchanged food, then language, where King recorded one of the first English to Māori vocabularies. But then they exchanged something else. He gave Tuki some chalk, where he drew a map of the world, as he knew it, on the floor of the government house. Tuki revealed knowledge of Te Ao Māori– Te Ika a Māui (The north island), Te Waipounamu (the south island), the Cavalli islands (Motukawanui), and in the middle, the spirit path which ends at Te Reinga where he marked a pōhutakawa tree– the leaping point of the spirits. After some months, provisions were made to return the rangatira home. King wouldn’t accompany them, but bestowed them with more taonga: handaxes, carpenters tools, scissors, razors, hoes, spades, seeds, wheat, maize, peas, ten sows, and two boars. Tuki promised to keep them. Upon their arrival home, a circle enclosed Tuki and he recounted what they had seen. He presented a cabbage which affirmed the distance of their journey, as it was cut five days before from Kings garden.

Like the crew of the HMS Deadelus, and King himself, Pākeha had no qualms in stating how terrified they were of stepping off their ships and schooners. For a couple of centuries before, Captain Cook circumnavigated his way through the Pacific, only to die in Hawaii. The Pacific had garnered a reputation as a place of heathen savages who ate their victims; which struck fear and moral panic in the hearts and minds of Pākeha. Pākeha is a way to describe someone of European descent. It’s said that it was the sailors and sealers themselves who earned their name themselves as “bugger ya!” often echoed onto the shore. Although Cook was literally cooked, it's not often known how he actually died. Cook came to Hawaii on his second visit just at the moment of a sacred ceremony which celebrated the atua, deity, Lono– who had been thrown out and promised to return annually to fertilise the land. Cook arrived right at the moment of Lono’s return. Hawaiians met him on the beach bearing gifts, bringing him to their temple, stretching out his arms, forming the image of Lono. Cook didn’t seem to mind at all being treated like a God, and happily indulged in their ceremonial procedures. Little did he know, in Hawaiian lore, a chief is said to return from overseas where he withstands a mock battle, to which he proceeds to challenge Lono, killing and dismantling him to become King. As Cook and his crew departed, some five kilometres off shore the mast of the ship broke, and so they had no choice but to turn around to fix it. The Hawaiians who had been loving him, showering him with gifts and affection, took this as a challenge to the King. Cook and his crew went to take the King hostage. This incendiary act became his end where he was clubbed down in the shallows. If Cook knew how to swim he would have definitely lived. If he knew the difference between gifts and barter, then things might have been different too.

Economists from this time, such as Adam Smith, held a very cynical theory about human nature that lies behind economic theory. It goes something like this, humans are driven by desires; these desires are unlimited. Humans are also rational, insofar as they will always tend to calculate the most efficient way of getting what they want. Hence, if they are left to their own devices, something like a ‘free market’ will inevitably develop. The force of the market is the principle of maximization– which assumes that (in modes of exchange) people will normally try to extract as much as possible from whoever they are dealing with, taking no consideration whatsoever of that other person’s interests. Alongside economic theory was the growth of science– which showed that everything is made up of isolable, controllable, and calculable parts– which encouraged a sense of possessive individualism. Its analytic logic brought binary splits, which led to the elaboration of grids of hierarchical control. As such, order became based on clear boundaries and stable divisions: maps, territories, blocks of land, countries, borders, bureaucracies based on filing systems, measurement, quantification, taxonomic hierarchies, censuses and cultures (Foucault, 1967). Nothing could be more favourable for colonial projects. As a social science, economics has always made the plausible claim that what it was doing was anything like natural science. Such as we saw with the rangatira, King, and even Cook– mutual recognition and even reciprocal exchange are absent in the first encounters between Māori and the Empire. To the rangatira, King’s gifts possessed hau; but for King, the gift was a deliberate way to instantiate demand. Why? because economics is about prediction– people with money want to know what other people with money are likely to do. The assumption is that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. Hence why Cook mistook his gifts for barter. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called ‘cynicism’ – most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics they call it “science”. 

Ruatara & Marsden